I was born in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. When I was three years old my parents separated and I was placed in an orphanage under the care of Catholic Nuns. When I was around eight, I was sent to a home run by Christian Brothers, who taught me how to play baseball and how to box. If we got into a fight, the Brothers made us put on boxing gloves and settle it.

At the age of fourteen, I was placed on a farm in upstate New York. I ran away a few times and lived on other farms. When I hit nineteen, I joined the Marine Corps and served for ten and a half years. When I joined in 1934, the Marines were teaching hand-to-hand combat, bayonet fighting and jiu-jitsu – all of which I absorbed. I trained with other Marine and F.B.I. agents under Colonel Biddle. I also met a Sergeant Kelly, who had been attached to the International Police in Shanghai, China in the 30’s. He was looking for someone to practice with and I had the qualifications. This is how I came to learn a unique fighting method that no one else in the U.S. teaches.

This method is based on Mongolian wrestling techniques intended to maim or cripple. Combined with other methods that I studied through out the years, these techniques form a complete system. My method combines boxing, jiu-jitsu, karate, principles of Tai-Chi and Aikido, and dirty fighting. Keeping only what is useful and practical for Self-Defense, there is not a wasteful technique.

Over the years I have had many students with black belts in other martial arts come to me; all were amazed at how little they knew about real self-defense, despite years of training. They felt my method had rounded out their knowledge of self-defense.

Many black belts and other so-called experts in the martial arts have been killed or injured in street fights because their skills didn’t work outside the dojo. I am convinced that anyone, even with no prior martial arts training or experience, can learn to defend themself in any ordinary or life-and-death situation.